EDMONTON – The door to the coaches' room was open just wide enough Monday night to reveal Canadiens head coach Guy Carbonneau standing with his back against the Saddledome wall, his blanched face blending with the white cinderblocks.

Down a hallway a half hour after his team had been humilated 6-2 by the Calgary Flames, the dressing room remained closed, the players holding a private meeting.

The locked door was in violation of an NHL regulation that states it must be open to reporters five minutes after the final player has left the ice, and leaves the team subject to a hefty league fine.

There wasn’t a member of the organization – not general manager Bob Gainey, in the hallway outside; not Carbonneau; not a player inside – who gave a rodent’s derrière about that.

The room was opened at 10:04 p.m., 32 minutes after the merciful final siren and following what CKAC broadcaster Dany Dubé, who was nearby, said was a meeting of considerable volume.

The silence from the small foyer outside the room suggested you’d find the usual few players prepared to talk. Instead, everyone was still in his stall, wordless and in full equipment, the only sound that of tape being slowly stripped from shinpads.

Fully 20 minutes later, rookies Matt D’Agostini and Max Pacioretty still sat motionless, staring vacantly as they processed what they’d just witnessed. Surely they’d never seen anything like this, their role models and idols perhaps calling each other out and quite possibly at each other’s throats.

Fifty-four games into this bizarre season, this meeting was called to privately clear the air. We’ll soon know whether it’s more fragrant after Wednesday's game here against the Oilers.

“We don’t have (team meetings) for no reason and it was a good opportunity and I think the right time to talk and express our feelings and whatever was in the mind,” Koivu said.

“Hopefully, we’ve cleared the air. And hopefully, it will help us to be more successful on the ice.”

Carbonneau took his team 10-pin bowling on Tuesday, a dramatic change of pace for a club that needs something to stop the bleeding.

(Try to imagine the kid at the control desk when the Canadiens marched in en masse at noon-hour and needed to rent bowling shoes. “You need what size, Mr. Laraque?”)

It clearly was a lighter day than Monday, when this team found yet another way to implode. When TVs over the lanes showed highlights, as they were, of Montreal’s sixth consecutive road loss, they were shut off.

One morning earlier, speaking almost cryptically, an increasingly frustrated Alex Kovalev said: “There’s a lot of stuff going on around the team and we’re trying to avoid that, not think about it.”

In the hear-a-pin-drop room after the game, he opened up on the statement in a puzzling way.

“The 100-year celebration, there have been a lot of questions about it, guys get fed up (with) that,” he said.

“It looks like it had a quick jump at the start of the season and now, I don’t know, guys get tired hearing of it all the time, I have no idea.

“I don’t know if you can call that something that will bother the players. I have no answer for that.”

A curious theory, since Kovalev has benefited from centennial festivities more than most. A centrepiece was last month’s All-Star Game, for which the Russian’s image still hangs outside the Bell Centre.

The team aggressively encouraged fans to vote Kovalev – the East captain and the game’s most valuable player – and three of his teammates to the starting lineup.

But as this growingly desperate game of pin-the-tale-on-the-donkey continues, a celebration of all that has been great about the Habs seems to have joined a list of reasons for the struggles of the current product.

There were flickering highlights against the Flames:

- Tomas Plekanec scored his 10th goal of the season, converting a wonderful Kovalev pass off a 2-on-1. But Plekanec finished the night at minus-3, the same as Christopher Higgins.

- Defenceman Josh Gorges was plus-2, a welcome swing. He had been minus-10 through his last 10 games.

- Goalie Jaroslav Halak, playing for the first time in 20 days, was brilliant when abandoned by his team, facing 20 shots in the second period alone. The Flames finally solved him, as they were bound to do.

There will be more meetings on Wednesday, hard preparation for the Oilers. But for one day, there was almost a lightness about the players during a brief spell away from hockey.

“It’s not going to be easy,” Koivu said of the road ahead. “We’re at the point when we have to turn things around. Now, it’s time for action.”

dstubbs@thegazette.canwest.com

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